Considering Taylor Swift has produced 2 albums this year, your correspondent hasn't been nearly as outwardly productive as I would have maybe liked.
Like many, the beginning of the pandemic brought together a lot of threads of my work, as a crisis that created a long-awaited universal narrative, and forced actual collective, public responses. For once, we couldn't ignore other people on the street. For once, what happened to people in Indonesia, in Taiwan, in Russia, in Djibouti - whatever 'other' country - affected 'us', not only on an abstract level of ethics, but directly. Protective bubbles were suddenly burst, and the outside entered in.
It didn't last long. Soon, the usual war for resources began, the game of blaming, the restoration of conceivable hierarchies based on gender, class, and race. But narratives remained and remain confused, with the state of shock likely to stretch well past the pandemic event itself.
Although I have been outwardly pretty dormant this year, inwardly I have been asking myself deeply the same question, almost like a mantra: What is the role of 'culture' in this state of shock? As I mentioned in earlier writing, culture has been thrown under the bus in many contexts, in a way that has never happened before. Whilst military actions, stock markets, sports, and ski holidays have continued over the pandemic, culture - with its associated rituals of assembly, togetherness, inclusion, and community - has been largely abandoned, in an unprecedented way. Even during World Wars, culture was adapted: theatre artists took to underground cabaret stages, radio dramas, reading stories to each other. Now the constant glow of the Netflix stream seems our only guiding light.
Criticism, and especially theatre criticism, which this writing platform is about, might seem like a strange place to go for answers to these questions. But the discourse around aesthetic objects - plays, art, music - ideally prepares us well for crises such as the pandemic. For one, it ensures that we keep our calm and our focus, that we are not distracted by fear, or panic, that we continue to notice important things even under immense pressure. Complex discourses that acknowledge nuanced international contexts provide vital immunisation against jingoist nationalism and hysterical doublethink that pervade the pandemic and seek to capitalise on anxiety and the need to find comforting, familiar lines. Criticism allows us to see the contradictions in their complexity, that there is at once both one pandemic, and many pandemics: for some, it is a total collapse of the protective forces they trust to keep them safe (borders, military, wealth). For others, whose existence is anyway precarious, it is business as usual: to die by the virus, or from starvation? Does it matter?
